Crushing Blow, Deadly Strike and Open Wounds

**Cauhtemoc** · 10-29-2005, 04:24 PM

Crushing Blow

Crushing blow gives a chance of reducing your targets health by a certain amount in a single blow. Quote from the Arreat Summit:

Originally Posted by The Arreat Summit

-Default: 1/4th
-vs. Players: 1/10th
-vs. Hirelings: 1/10th
-vs. Champions, Uniques, Bosses: 1/8th
-with missile weapons, default: 1/8th
-with missile weapons, vs. Players: 1/20th
-with missile weapons, vs Hirelings: 1/20th
-with missile weapons, vs Champions, Uniques, Bosses: 1/16th

As we can see, in melee, it removes 25% of the monsters life, in addition to whatever damage you do. This values changes if you're fighting at range, or against a boss or unique monster. If the monster has 50% physical reduction, then only half the damage is dealt, as with most things.

Say you do 0 damage, and you have 100% chance of a crushing blow. The crushing blow is triggered on a normal monster with 1'000 hit points, no physical reduce, and in a single player game. Naturally, 250 hit points will be removed, and the monster will end up with 750 hit points.

Crushing blow is triggered again, but this time, only 187 hit points are removed (or 25% of the monsters remaining life), and the monster will end up with 563 hit points.

Note that after 7 or 8 hits, the monsters life will be down at a fraction of the original value, and you're hardly doing any damage at all. Hence you can never kill a monster with only crushing blow! The diminishing returns will make this impossible.

Now, to make everything more complicated, you cannot always calculate the damage done by simply removing a certain amount of percents from the targets remaining life. Monsters will have a higher life the more players there are in a game, and players will have a higher life due to Battle Orders or Oak Sage. This "extra life" is treated differently.

The exact amount of extra life will vary, and we need to know this before we can determine exactly how much damage we do.

In the case of monsters, the amount of extra life is given by the following: Life = (Number of players + 1) / 2

In the case of other players, the amount of extra life is given by the following: Life = Increased life in percents / 100 + 1

With Battle Orders, the percentage is given by the following: Increased life in percents = 32 + Skill level * 3

With Oak Sage, the percentage is given by the following: Increased life in percents = 25 + Skill level * 5

If you are fighting someone with both Battle Orders and Oak Sage, you simply add the two percentage values together.

As we can see, if we are fighting a monster in a single player game, or fighting another player without Battle Orders or Oak Sage, the amount of extra life will be 1.

Now we can calculate how much damage we really do. This is given by: Real damage = Crushing blow damage / Extra life

Now say we're fighting the same monster as before but in an 8 player game. The monster now has 4.5 times as much life, or 4'500 hit points.

So you hit it and trigger a crushing blow, the first will removed a total of 250 hit points, or the crushing blow damage on the monsters total life (4'500 in this case) divided by the increase in life (4.5 times).

Hence, 25% out of 4'500 is 1'125, and 1'125 divided by 4.5 gives a total of 250 hit points removed, which leaves the monster with 4'250 hit points.

You hit the monster again, but this time, only 236 damage is dealt. Or 25% out of 4'250, which equals 1'062, and then 1'062 divided by 4.5, which gives a total of 236 hit points removed, and the monster now has 4'014 hit points remaining.

As noted, the actual crushing blow damage does not decrease the more "extra life" the target has, but it does a lower percentage of the targets total life. So while the percentage of crushing blow damage is smaller, it's much more consistent. Hence, subsequent hits do more damage.

For example, in melee, that's 1/4th in 1-player games, 1/6th in 2-player games, 1/8th in 3-player games, all the way down to 1/18th in 8-player games.

So melee crushing blow in a 1-player game multiplies the monster's life by 3/4th each time you score a hit, hence, the multiplier is 5/6th in 2-player games, 7/8th in 3-player games, all the way down to 17/18th in 8-player games. Therefore, after the initial hit, crushing blow does more damage in larger games.

Champions, unique monsters and their minions also have more life than their normal counterparts, but these enchantments actually increase the base life of the monster, so the crushing blow will be scaled and increased when fighting these.

To save you the trouble of having to calculate all of this, I have made a crushing blow calculator, which you can download further down on this post. The calculator will output the crushing blow damage in percents, it will calulate the targets exact life, and how much damage the target will take from each hit.

Crushing blow items stack in all cases, there is only one chance to trigger a crushing blow per hit. There is no cap on how high the chance to trigger a crushing blow can get, but anything over 100% is a waste.

Deadly Strike

Deadly strike gives you the chance to do double damage. All melee damage is doubled, whether its physical, magic or elemental (i.e. skills such as Berserk, Vengeance or Fire Claws for example). Deadly Strike does not work with Smite.

Deadly strike is the last thing that's applied to your damage, meaning that all other damage modifiers are taken into account as well.

Deadly Strike stack in all cases, there is only one chance to trigger a deadly strike blow per hit. There is no cap on how high the chance to trigger a deadly strike can get, but anything over 100% is a waste.

Deadly strike and Critical Strike (passive Amazon skill, also found on the runeword Insight), should not be mixed up. Although they work in the same way, they stack with eachother (although in a rather unusual way), and thus cannot trigger at the same time (i.e. resulting in quadruple damage). The exact chance to do double damage is given by: Real chance to do double damage = Critical Strike + (Deadly Strike / 100) * (100 - Critical Strike)

For example, with a 75% chance of deadly strike, and 25% chance of Critical Strike, the real chance to do double damage is 81.25%. Or 0.75 (75 divided by 100) times 75 (100 minus 25) plus 25.

All of this can also be found in the calculator attached at the end of this post.

Open Wounds

Open wounds gives a chance of making your target bleed uncontrollably. Open wounds work in a similar way to poison, in that it makes the target slowly loose life. Unlike poison however, there is no way to resist damage from open wounds.

Open wounds stack in all cases, there is only one chance to trigger a open wounds per hit. There is no cap on how high the chance to trigger a open wounds can get, but anything over 100% is a waste.

Open wounds lasts for 8 seconds. The counter is reset if you get hit with several open wounds in a short time frame, you cannot have several open wounds active on you at the same time!

The damage done depends on the level of the attacker. Damage per second is given by the following:

Character Level 1-15: 25 * (9 * Character Level + 31) / 256
Character Level 16-30: 25 * (18 * Character Level - 104) / 256
Character Level 31-45: 25 * (27 * Character Level - 374) / 256
Character Level 46-60: 25 * (36 * Character Level - 779) / 256
Character Level 61-99: 25 * (45 * Character Level - 1319) / 256

To get the total damage just multiply this number with the duration (i.e. 8 seconds).

For example, a character at level 90 would do 267 damage per second, for a total of 2136 damage.

The damage is divided by 4 if you are fighting another player in melee, and by 8 if you are fighting another player using a missile weapon.

Versus bosses and champions the damage is divided by 2.

All of this can also be found in the calculator attached at the end of this post.

Crushing Blow, Deadly Strike and Open Wounds calculator

Use this to automatically calculate all of what I explained above. Download here. Feel free to scan this with every malware scanner known to man (this one in particular is very good).

Requires the .NET framework, or it will generate some rather funky initialization errors. If you do not already have it, you can get it of Microsoft's website (here).

**Ishin** · 11-26-2005, 02:55 PM

wow dude
i dont really understand it all but thxs for taking the time to type all of that
btw what happened to ur smater guide? it was stickied now its not there.....

**Insane-Ninja** · 12-03-2005, 08:19 AM

i cant download the calculator so i wanna see if you can help me. ok i have a ww barbarian.my weapons are...eth fleshripper which is like -targets def, 50% open wounds, 33% deadly strike, and 25% crushing blow....and i have an ebotdz in the other hand. no without and other mods from armor helms or shields.... how much dmg can i be expected to do if all those mods work on a single hit and i do 100 base dmg. if you reply thanks it would really help with perfecting this build